


echar un patín (or, to throw a skate)

by fruitwhirl



Series: peraltiago tumblr prompts [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, amy teaches jake spanish, kind of but not really, lots of cuban idioms/slang as according to the internet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 07:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12206805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitwhirl/pseuds/fruitwhirl
Summary: Amy teaches Jake Spanish (or, more specifically: Amy Santiago is bilingual, damn it)





	echar un patín (or, to throw a skate)

**Author's Note:**

> from an anonymous user on tumblr asking for "amy teaching jake spanish," and subsequently, me not being able to really fill it and instead ending up with something else. 
> 
> title is a cuban expression, with the literal meaning of "to throw a skate," according to [here](http://%5Dwww.fluentu.com/blog/spanish/cuban-slang/), but idiomatically, "to run."

The first time Jake encounters the Santiago clan, he’s just come off of his second year as Amy’s official partner at the Nine-Nine, and they’ve finally got into a comfortable kind of cadence, filled to the brim with half-hearted bickering and late-night Thai food runs—which they established after their first kidnapping case together that lasted for six days and _thankfully_ ended with the hostage’s life intact. And it’s one of those weeks, where they’re both casing a smaller drug ring, and neither have been anywhere but the small hotel room they’re using as their base and the precinct in over sixty-seven hours.

It’s right in the middle of that third afternoon as they’re poring over an old case file sitting shoulder to shoulder at her desk (only because, frankly, his is covered in candy bar wrappers and crumbs) and Amy’s leaning into him to see one of the pictures better and she smells faintly of lemons and maybe something else which is crazy because he doesn’t remember the last time either of them had the chance to shower, when there’s a call of “ _Aimelis!”_

Amy rolls her eyes, but as she turns around, grins broadly, saying “Luis!” and goes to shake hands with the Latino man with dark, curly hair (who promptly disregards the aforementioned hand and wraps her up in a bear hug). Jake hasn’t ever seen him before, but he’s got the same small nose and big brown eyes and tan as his partner, so he thinks that they’re probably related.

By the time Jake stands and notices the large, brown paper bag the man he assumes to be Luis holds, Amy’s finally extricated herself from the hug and has furrowed her eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

“You missed dinner last night!”

At this point, Jake expects her to devolve into that slightly more anxious, significantly more apologetic version of herself that falls into a pit of _oh my gosh I didn’t put it on either of my planners I’m so so sorry,_ but instead she just lets out a bark of laughter before explaining, “I told papa yesterday that I wouldn’t be able to go out to Jersey; I was on a stakeout until four in the morning.”

“And it wasn’t just an excuse not to see Leo’s new wife?” Luis asks this with a slippery smile.

But Amy just shakes her head, citing the perp’s nocturnal schedule for her absence. “I wouldn’t miss mama’s cooking for the world.” And then her eyes slide to the paper bag in his hands. “Please tell me you brought—”

“Of course, _Mila._ She wouldn’t let me leave the house without an entire pot of _fricasé de pollo_ to bring you.”

And then Amy makes this noise as she takes the food that Jake has never heard come out of her mouth, kind of an _eeek_ sound, and he takes this as an opportunity to introduce himself.

“What up, I’m Detective Jake Peralta, the best detective in the NYPD. I’m basically Amy’s mentor.”

He extends a hand, which the other man just looks at for a moment, bemused, before raising an eyebrow to his sister, who just shakes her head dismissively and says, “Jake is, uh, más rollo que película,1” which makes Luis chuckle.

This isn’t the first he’s heard her speak Spanish. On particularly stressful days, she’ll often spout out what he assumes to be Spanish curse words, and phrases like “deja la singae!2” and “te sueno la cara3”—especially at him. When he asked Rosa about it, she just snickered in a way that momentarily made him fear for his life.4

Now though, Jake does what he normally does in situations where he doesn’t understand what’s going on. “You’re probably insulting me, but since I don’t speak Spanish, I’m just going to assume you’re telling him that you’re completely and irrevocably in love with me.”

Amy rolls her eyes and internally it makes him smile just a little bit. “Yes, that’s exactly what I said. Verbatim.”

“ _Noice.”_

(When Luis leaves, Amy digs into the stuff she says is basically chicken stew with zeal, and even lets Jake have a bowl—after a lot of groaning and complaining because _yes, Jake, I know it smells good and the last thing you ate was a bag of pistachios at midnight, but my mother’s cooking is the only thing that keeps me going on days like today_ —as they plow back into the case.)

 

* * *

 

Honestly, Jake doesn’t comprehend just how much Spanish peppers Amy’s speech until they start dating, because she lets syllable slip out randomly that it takes a minute for him to realize that he doesn’t have a clue what she’s saying. Sure, there are the standard _gracias_ and _como te llama_ that he can recall from his required high school foreign language classes, but it’s more in the little things.

Like when she’s cooking—which admittedly, doesn’t happen very often, because Jake Peralta _does_ value his life to some degree, thank you very much—and she’ll be reading the recipe her mother wrote down for her, but it’s not entirely in English and instead sprinkled with different words for baking powder and milk, which leads to many, _many_ incidents where she adds a pinch of something instead of just chopping it. Or, they’re grocery shopping and she’ll list out the different items they need to buy in her default Spanish while he just stares at her blankly, because _boy_ does he have no idea what an “el dentÍfrico” is until they’re in the toothpaste aisle and she points at a bright blue tube of Crest. Or, they’re lying in bed and she’s nestled into his side and they’re just chatting about their day when they’re working cases with other people, and she forgets how to say a word in English, so she’ll spit out its synonyms in Spanish until she can find the right word (it’s so adorable that sometimes his heart aches watching her grow increasingly frustrated and then quickly morph into a sort of excitement when she remembers it).

With that in mind, he files away her bilingualism as another integral part of her being (and thusly, another reason why he loves her so much). He picks up phrases here and there when she takes the time to explain them—“vender gato por liebre” is one of his favorites that is supposed to mean “bait and switch”, but when he types it into google, it apparently translates to something relating to selling a cat for a rabbit (to which she clarifies that it’s a Cuban expression and that different countries have different sayings)—and sometimes he’ll try to whip something he learns out in the field and apparently butcher the pronunciation, if the uproarious laughs from one of the perps he tracks down are anything to go by.

It’s during dinner one night, when they’ve got takeout from the Polish place a block from her place spread out on the coffee table that she brings up her mother. Jake’s new mattress had just been shipped and set to arrive the following day, and she explains that she had called her mom the night before and told her about Jake and there’s a little smile on her face accompanied by that sort of anxiety that he knows too well.

“And basically, my mother wants to talk to you tonight. It will probably be for a few hours and she will definitely ask you about our sex life.” She says this all in the rush of one breath, trying to hide her nerves by bringing the last of a presumably now-cold potato pancake to her lips.

Jake laughs. “I’ve already had dinner with her a few times. Last time I saw her, she called me _chiquito.”_ 5 When he’d told Amy that before, she had just smiled, suppressed giggles; while he would normally be offended and wary of this, he recalls the affection in Mrs. Santiago’s voice and decides that whatever it means doesn’t matter.

“That was before we started dating.”

“It’ll be fine.”

It was not fine.

Turns out, maybe-future-mother-in-law Camila Santiago is much more— _intense_ —than his-colleague’s-mother Camila Santiago. Prior to this conversation, Jake thought he’d picked up a decent amount of Spanish from both his partner and Rosa, but after the exchange of pleasantries, there is a solid fifteen minute period where Jake doesn’t understand a single word the older woman says and another thirty where he catches a mixture of the few phrases Amy has taught him and English.

Upon Mrs. Santiago fondly dubbing him _mijo_ and bidding him farewell, his face must give away his numb shock because Amy cracks up the moment he glances over at her.

Jake refuses to be _that_ stupefied the next time he talks to her mother, and convinces Amy to teach him basic Spanish. As expected, she gets inordinately excited and starts muttering to herself that night about multi-colored note-cards, and they spend the following three months of breaks at work squished together on the old, tattered couch, flipping through verbs and household vocabulary.

(The last time he spent so much time studying another language was when he was younger and learning Hebrew.)

He honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> okay so just as an fyi, i am white, i speak very little spanish (am actually taking latin right now and it's a lot of fun), but i wanted to include cuban slang/expressions because i could. the translations for the footnotes are below. also: i stand by the fact that amy probably has a really weird full name (aimelis) and that another way to shorten that, aside from amy, is "mila." 
> 
> 1\. “He’s more roll than film” (more talk than actual substance)
> 
> 2\. “Stop bothering me!”
> 
> 3\. “I hit you in the face.”
> 
> 4\. okay so i know that melissa is cuban and steph is argentinian (thus their characters are cuban and argentinian respectively) so they’re likely going to have different household phrases, but i figured they’d probably catch on to each other’s sayings? especially since they’re both the only two female and/or latina detectives on the squad and are total bffs. anyways i love the rosa and amy friendship a lot okay i love them.
> 
> 5\. “little one” i saw this on a list of endearments so i’m sorry if it’s not super accurate but i thought it was 1) cute and 2) apt because i headcanon that all of amy’s brothers are tall because she’s relatively tall – 5’6 i think – and mama santiago would 100% notice the difference between her sons and jake, and also comment on just how adorable our sunshine boy is. (also yes, 5’6 is tall to me – i am 5’1.5 ok)
> 
> i got all of the translations/sayings from the websites below, let me know if they're wrong! 
> 
> http://havanatourcompany.com/10-spanish-phrases-you-should-know-while-you-are-in-cuba/ 
> 
>  
> 
> https://www.grittyspanish.com/2017/06/14/popular-cuban-phrases-and-sayings-you-should-know/ 
> 
>  
> 
> http://www.fluentu.com/blog/spanish/cuban-slang/ 
> 
> feel free to leave prompts in the comments or hit me up at [dmigod on tumblr](http://dmigod.tumblr.com).


End file.
